Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- List of illustrations -- Notes on contributors -- Acknowledgments -- 1 Introduction: feminism in European history -- 2 The languages of late-medieval feminism -- 3 A 'learned wave': women of letters and science from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment -- 4 L'égalité des sexes qui ne se conteste plus en France: feminism in the seventeenth century -- 5 Reclaiming the European Enlightenment for feminism: or prologomena to any future history of eighteenth-century Europe -- 6 Culture as a gendered battleground: the patronage of Madame de Pompadour -- 7 A woman's struggle for a language of enlightenment and virtue: Mary Wollstonecraft and Enlightenment 'feminism' -- 8 French utopians: the word and the act -- 9 Equality and difference: utopian feminism in Britain -- 10 Liberalism and feminism in late nineteenth-century Britain -- 11 Feminists and sex: how to find lesbians at the turn of the century -- 12 Beauvoir's philosophy as the hidden paradigm of contemporary feminism -- 13 Contemporary feminism between individualism and community -- Guide to further reading -- Index.

Spanning six centuries of political thought in European history, this book puts the ideas of thinkers from Christine de Pizan to Simone de Beauvoir in the broader contexts of their time. This intriguing collection of essays shows that feminism is not a varient of modern radical discourse but a mode of analysing the issues of authority, power and virtue that have been at the heart of European political thought from the middle ages.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2018. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.